Virginia L. Collins-English

Virginia L. Collins-English, M.Ed., CAGS, MAAT, is an experienced spiritual director and retreat director. She has graduate degrees in theology, counseling psychology, and marriage and family therapy, and certification as a spiritual director and Ignatian retreat director. She is also a triply-licensed psychotherapist. Her ministry has been enriched by her vocational experiences, which include providing therapy to individuals, couples, and families; administering an early childhood antipoverty program; providing counseling to severely disabled children and their families; designing innovative college theology courses; serving as college administrator of community services; and serving as a pastoral minister in a diocesan office of bereavement ministry. Her experiences also include teaching and counseling in a small fishing village in Ghana, Benedictine reverse mission in Mexico, and broad-spectrum ministry in Haiti.

Collins-English offers individual spiritual direction in several settings, including her own practice, Holy Listening. She offers directed retreats and guided retreats in parishes, academic settings, and retreat centers, including Campion Center, the Jesuit retreat house where she serves on the spiritual direction staff. The widow of an African-American civil rights leader and professor, Collins-English has a particular interest in serving the spiritual yearnings of people who are marginalized by church or culture, and those who are bereaved. A writer and artist, she is the author of Prayering: Openings for Contemplation and Personal Prayer and the creator of the quilt, photographs, paintings, collages, and sculptures included in its pages. She is a lay Cistercian. She lives quietly in western Massachusetts.

She adds:

My deepest, most validating experience has been the since-babyhood revelation of life as sacramental and incarnational. St. Ignatius of Loyola spoke of “finding God in all things.” And so it is: from the cherishing love of my family to the joy-filled love of my marriage, from the nurturance of nature’s wonders to the trust-filled grace of ministry with others and their personal holy stories – through all flow the gifts of the gratitude and yearning and healing, faith and hope and love.